http://www.xojane.comhttp://www.xojane.com/site/images/apple-touch-icon.pngElisabeth Harker - xoJanehttp://www.xojane.comTempestFri, 09 Dec 2016 15:25:34 GMTFri, 09 Dec 2016 15:25:34 GMThttp://www.xojane.com/issues/how-not-to-be-a-dick-abroadhttp://www.xojane.com/issues/how-not-to-be-a-dick-abroadSun, 11 Aug 2013 16:00:00 GMTNote to self: Do not be a dick. It’s a mandate that I’ve failed at from time to time during my nearly five years in China.

Don't I look dickish?

A lot of How Not to Be a Dick articles have been popping up on xoJane recently, most of them (rightly) written from the point of view of the person at the receiving end of the dickery. This isn’t one of those. It’s more a reminder to myself to behave myself while enjoying the wonderful opportunity I’ve had to live and work in another country. Note to self: Do not be a dick, do not be a dick, do not be a DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK.

Suffice to say, it’s a mandate that I’ve failed at from time to time during my nearly five years in China.

Let’s set a scene. It was a freezing cold afternoon about two days before Christmas. I’d been working all day, and indeed all week, hardly taking a break from the pile of marking on my desk. The approaching holiday had left me homesick, as it usually does, and I was at the bank trying to exchange money to send home to cover both my student loans for that month and a surprise Christmas gift for my mother (funds to buy a plane ticket and come visit me).

Sending money home is a big stressor for me, because it’s a long procedure and something always seems to go wrong. I always go into the bank tense with the expectation of my oncoming failure. As usual, on this trip, something did go wrong. What was more, the woman behind the front counter glared at me, or at least I perceived that she did.

So I cried, publicly, in the bank. I didn’t want to, and I wish I hadn’t, and it attracted a shit ton of attention without actually helping my case in any way.

Leaving the bank, I could only think what a spoiled first-world brat I must have seemed, and how I must have embodied in five minutes every negative thing people have ever thought about my country.

I’ve to some degree forgiven myself for being the fat American woman having a foot stomping hissy fit in the Bank of China, but at the same time I’ll certainly never go inside that particular branch again.

There’s one story of my dickish anti-glory. A dick is not something that I want to be, and I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s not what most people reading this article aspire towards either. And thus, without further preamble, I give you my list of tips for not being a dick abroad.

Don’t assume that people don’t know your native language.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that this is especially true if your native language is English. Just because somebody is not confident speaking it doesn’t mean they can’t understand you. There’s nothing ruder than talking about somebody behind their back when their back is less than a foot away from yours.

But don’t expect people to know your native language either.

Even if that language is English.

Think before frustration turns you racist.

On many occasions I’ve had locals jump out in front of me and steal taxis I was just about to catch. The temptation to whine about how CHINESE PEOPLE KEEP STEALING MY TAXIS is strong, until I consider the fact that I am in China, and Chinese people being the majority of the population, of course they are the ones stealing my taxis.

If I were in America the people stealing my taxis, and committing whatever other random offenses set my blood boiling, would be primarily other Americans. In this case I would not be swearing under my breath about how Americans keep doing <insert frustrating behavior here>, I’d be swearing about how people keep doing it. I need to make sure to always employ that same mode of thinking here.

Also, about that time I jumped gleefully in front of an old man with a gaping head wound to take a taxi that clearly should have been his while cackling, “I win! I win! At last I win!" That was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it.

You are not an extra-special gift to the country you are residing in, by virtue of being foreign.

I’m a foreign English teacher who works at a primary school that employs about twenty fresh foreign teachers a year. Some of them are of the opinion that they’ve come to save the children and teach the locals about the right way to do education.

That isn’t how it goes. We fill a specific need, and also we make a lot of money for the school by virtue of being novel. Being from far away does not make our opinions and deeds more important, even though it certainly might make them different. Locals don’t have to listen to us any more than they would any other person. In fact, there are a lot of cases where it would make sense for them to take our opinions less into account, particularly when we’re fresh-faced and new and just don’t get it.

Being abroad doesn’t mean you get to do anything you want and have it not count.

Moving to another country does not give you a free pass to spend your Friday nights rampaging drunken through the streets carrying the artwork that you stole from the bars before taking a quick pit stop to sleep with ALL the prostitutes. I mean, if that was your typical Friday night back home, or those are choices you’d be comfortable with making regardless of where you are in the world, then go for it, I guess (though I’m a prude and generally in favor of NOT going for it).

People have different ideas of what constitutes bad behavior. That said, doing something you would consider morally wrong back home does not suddenly become hilarious just because you are far from that home.

Be aware of how much time you spend complaining.

A fellow American who has been in China for eight years now told me that he’s been distancing himself from other foreigners these days because whenever we get to together in a big group, it turns into a huge gripe about China session. I’m of the opinion that there is some room for complaints, not because China is terrible, but because culture shock is real, and home-sickness is real, and the feeling of being constantly different and other even long after the point when culture shock and home-sickness should have passed is real too.

That said, if you ever reach the point where every other thing you say is something negative about your host country, then it’s worth considering whether or not this is because you only have negative feelings towards it. If not, then lighten up a little. If so, maybe it’s time to think about going home, if that’s a possibility for you.

When I stop my reflexive complaints and think about how I feel about my current situation, I realize very quickly that I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, and the footprints on the seat of Chicony Mall’s one Western toilet actually aren’t a big deal at all.

Also, check the random mockery.

I’m so guilty of this, and quite ashamed to admit it (particularly on this website). I don’t know how long I’ve been doing things like reaching for a bottle of ice cold water while sarcastically chirping to the other non-locals assembled: “Well, that’s it! I guess I’m going to die now!” (hot water is considered infinitely more healthy here), but it needs to stop.

That’s not the same as venting to a friend when I’m genuinely upset and frustrated. It’s me making an unfair judgment call about another culture, and it’s not even a judgment call that has any reason to be made. Nobody is trying to pry my cold water out of my hands.

It’s okay to take a break from it all.

If you’re on holiday, and you need some time in your room with a book, or at the local McDonald’s with a burger, take it. I’m lucky in that I live in China for the long term, so I’m not under any pressure to fly about seeing everything around the country that I want to as quickly as I can, even though there are still things that I desperately want to see. I spend time each day locked in my room reading xoJane or writing stupid Little Women fic in English, and not thinking of where I am.

There’s a little Irish pub that I go to about twice a month that my English friends say feels like England, and my Canadian friends say feels like Canada, and I say feels like home. Things like that keep me sane.

And thus ends my list of advice. I only hope that I can achieve all of it. It all sounds easy, but I find that it actually takes a great deal of awareness and effort. Is there anything else I should have included? For those of you who have spent time living outside of your home country, how easy or difficult have you found it to adjust?

Here I am preparing to perform surgery on this Panda.

(Not really. This is what they make you wear if you want to cuddle a panda in Chengdu.)

]]>http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/the-joys-and-sorrows-of-being-a-fat-foreign-girl-in-chinahttp://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/the-joys-and-sorrows-of-being-a-fat-foreign-girl-in-chinaFri, 24 Aug 2012 13:00:00 GMT"Fat” was the third or fourth word I learned in Chinese, somewhere after “hello,” “thank you” and “I don’t understand.”

Wuhan and the Yangtze River as seen from atop the Yellow Crane Tower

August 28th will mark the four-year anniversary of the day I stepped off the plane to begin my new job as a primary school English teacher in Wuhan China. My original plan was to stay here for ten months to learn a bit of Chinese and get a bit of work experience. Now I have a hard time imagining how I’ll ever leave.

Primary school teachers in China move up with their classes from one grade to the next, so I’ve had the same students my whole time here and I’m stupidly attached to my job. I have a cat, an apartment and friends. Wuhan feels more like home for me with every passing day.

Wuhan doesn’t have a lot of foreigners. I can go months without running into any foreign person who isn’t a co-worker of mine. “Foreigner” was one of the first words in Chinese that I learned. “Fat” wasn’t the second word that I learned in Chinese. It was probably the third or fourth. It came in somewhere after “hello,” “thank you” and “I don’t understand,” but before “How much does this cost?”.

At five foot three and 250 pounds (give or take), I’m definitely regarded as fat in my home country. In middle school, boys on the school bus used to make up songs about my fatness. The thing is, by high school they’d gotten bored of it, and I’d formed a happy nerdy little clique made up mostly of other fat girls. I hated my body and took it for granted that I was ugly and would surely never date, but the hate was never that intense. There were plenty of other people who looked like me. If I needed clothes I could just go to Fashion Bug. I went on diets once in a while, but mostly just carried on with life in my merry invisible way.

Moving to China made me ultra visible, and made my fat something I couldn’t ignore and separate myself from. The first time I heard somebody exclaim in Chinese “Look at that foreigner! How fat!", I was actually thrilled about it. I was just so proud that I understood something in the language I was studying. From that point on I heard that phrase quite a bit when I went out, but took it in stride. I’d never had any illusions that I was thin, and I didn’t hear it any more often than comments about the other foreign people I was with being tall or having big noses.

Then my Chinese got better and I realized that there were two words for fat. One word, “pang,” is a fairly neutral physical descriptor. The other, “fei”, is used to convey disgust. Once I learned the second word it became the soundtrack to my life. Every time I leave the house, even just to walk two minutes to the corner store, I can be assured of hearing that word. What I hate most is when little old ladies look me in the eye, make this tsk tsk tsk sound of disgust, and then walk away chatting loudly with their friends about just how fei I am.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with locals about my fatness. Some of them have been odd, like this one teenaged girl who wanted to practice English with me at a coffee shop -- she told me that she thought fat was cute, and asked me for suggestions on how to make her pet hamster gain weight. Other times strangers will give me diet advice, mostly that I should eat more vegetables and less McDonald’s. My school offers three free meals a day for all of its teachers, Chinese and foreign alike, and I take advantage of them. They’re rich in vegetables and also notable for being the exact same thing in the exact same portions that everybody else is eating. As for McDonald’s, not only do I not enjoy the taste of it, but the idea of walking into that restaurant is too keenly humiliating for me to even consider it.

When I was asked to renew my first contract at the primary school, I was told that everybody had expected me to be lazy because I was so fat, but now they thought I was hardworking and a good teacher. If anything could have turned me into a workaholic, it was that. I spent the summer taking a course on how to be a better ESL teacher, and spent nearly every waking moment preparing lessons lest anybody start to doubt their decision to let me stay and decide that I was indeed fat and lazy.

Working constantly became second nature. If I wasn’t doing something job related, I was in Chinese lessons. I became friends with the family that runs the local corner shop, and got to hear a lot of gossip on what the neighbors think about the local foreign population, myself included. They told me that the nearby shop keepers had nicknames to use when gossiping about the foreign teachers at my school, and that I’d originally been known as the fat one, but now I was known as the one who knew Chinese. I redoubled my language-learning efforts.

My third year in Wuhan I won an award for being one of the top performing foreign English teachers in Hubei province. I also reached a very bad place emotionally. The casual self-hatred that I’d always harbored had become a monster that could only be controlled by success in things not body related. If one of the lessons I taught didn’t go well or I didn’t have time to memorize all of the new vocabulary before heading off to Chinese class, I felt like I had no self-worth whatsoever, like I was fat and nothing else.

Overtime at the school had me working seven days a week, and I’d taken on so many extra classes that I was skipping meals to mark. I was too stressed to sleep most nights. And no, I didn’t lose a lot of weight, but I do think that my job had become what a diet is for some people; it was my path to redemption and actualization, and I was trying to cover up the excess pounds with success since just losing them had never worked.

Then I started to find fat acceptance blogs on the Internet. The first was the LiveJournal group Fatshionista, which I stalked for a long time before gaining the courage to join. I followed the links and discovered all kinds wonderful places on the Internet that told me I didn’t have to hate myself, and that a fat body didn’t mean that I was a freak and an atrocity (and yes, of course one of them was Two Whole Cakes and it ended up leading me to xoJane).

If I’d read the same blogs before moving to China I don’t think that they would have had such an impact on me. Hating my body a little bit had always been comfortable for me, and I probably would have been comfortable with it for the rest of my life. I needed that hatred to become so oppressive that I couldn’t deal with it before I let it go.

I won’t say that I learned to love myself overnight, because I don’t think anybody does. I will say that I think the process was surprisingly quick for me, just because I needed to find that process quickly or else self-destruct. It was a matter of self-preservation.

Finding a way to be happy about my appearance was the easiest part. Wuhan has this wonderful street that consists of nothing but tailors and fabric stores. Chinese clothes are all too small for me -- my size does not exist here -- but getting stuff custom made at the tailor street is way better than buying my clothing in any store. Being able to get clothes that look exactly the way I want them to and fit me perfectly in every way has made me like clothes for the first time in my life. I probably like them too much. I’m making up for lost time, I guess.

Picking out fabric = joy

Workaholic tendencies aren’t so easy to give up. Telling myself that I intrinsically deserve to exist even if I’m not a perfect teacher and I forget every sentence in Chinese except for “More fries, please!” is harder. I’ve been trying to cast my way of thinking in a different way -- I’ll tell myself that I’m up late making another PowerPoint not because if I don’t make one I’ll be a disgrace and everyone will hate me, but because my students are wonderful people and deserve my full effort.

As for the comments -- I know that they aren’t going to stop any time soon, but the people that make them don’t know me. If I were walking down the street in my hometown in America and suddenly saw a giraffe, I would certainly comment, because that just isn’t a thing I see every day. If the giraffe had three eyes, I don’t doubt that I would turn to my friend and gasp: “Look over there at that giraffe! It has three eyes!”.

On the streets of Wuhan I’m a three-eyed giraffe.

Well, sort of. I’m sure everyone is well aware that I’m a human, but I’m an oddity, and I’ve made the choice to be here and I need to put up with that. Now instead of getting angry or internalizing every negative thing I hear, I talk to people more. Engaging people in conversation means I’m more than just some blubberous anomaly walking down the street, and they’re friends rather than obstacles on my path to self-acceptance.

]]>http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/it-happened-me-alcoholism-killed-my-dadhttp://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/it-happened-me-alcoholism-killed-my-dadWed, 15 Aug 2012 19:30:20 GMTOne day I was told that if he gave up drinking he might have two years to live, the next he was in rehab, and then just a couple of weeks later the news was that he’d gone on a drinking binge and was in the hospital.

An artistic representation of child!me and my father. He never actually had a goatee.

When I was seven years old and my sister was five, we came to what seemed to us to be a very logical and obvious decision -- for the rest of our lives she could belong to our mother and I could belong to our dad.

Now, this was long before the first whispers of their impending divorce, which didn’t happen until I was in fifth grade. Nonetheless, I was older than my sister and manipulative, and I wanted to be certain that I got the best share of the familial love in our household. After all, my mother had this heinously evil tendency to not let us eat skittles and chocolate milk for supper, and she never brought us to carnivals. My dad was the obvious choice!

Time passed and my parents actually split, and I spent a lot of time trying to think of how I could move out of my mother’s house to go live with my dad.

It wasn’t really her fault. I only saw my dad for a couple of weeks each year, and he knew how to make every visit a nonstop party. When I was obsessed with Star Trek at 13, he rented every film for me, and never once complained about my tendency to go into monologues about how Janeway and Chakotay (Voyager ftw!) were meant to get married and be sooo in love forever.

When I decided at 14 that my new obsession was Cats: The Musical, he arranged tickets for me to see the show on Broadway. We sat in the cheap seats at the back of the theatre where he fell asleep, but I still thought it the most perfect night of my young life (except for the snoring).

At night, we’d go back to his filthy apartment in my grandma’s basement, and he would drink and tell me about my family history, but only the bad parts. Mostly the parts about my mom.

He said he still loved her, but it seemed like what he loved most was to list off every “bad” thing she’d ever done. He’d follow that up by telling me about every bad thing that he’d ever done, just to be fair. I held no illusions as to my father’s sobriety, but his brutal honesty about everything appealed very much to my teenage sensibilities.

The older I got, the less I saw of my dad. I never knew where he was and how to contact him, and nobody else did either. He’d show up, at first a couple of times a year, and then once every couple of years. I thought he was a hero just for coming.

I have two strong memories of my dad from when I was in college. During my sophomore year, my school clumsily threw together a production of the Rocky Horror Show. I had been in contact with my dad for several consecutive months at that point, and I was to play Eddie. We shared a common love of all things Rocky Horror so I invited him to come watch. He showed up with disheveled hair and a beaten-up wheelchair that he’d “found somewhere” and asked if we had a Doctor Scott. We didn’t, and my dad was welcomed into the show. There are photos floating around Facebook of him onstage amongst a group of my underwear-clad friends.

The other memory isn’t as nice. I was at a friend’s party, and he called me after over a year of radio silence to say that he was in my city and wanted to hang out. I was having a great time, and wasn’t about to leave it behind for him. My friends and I joked at the nerve of him trying to break up my plans after not talking to me for so long. I tried to call him the next day, but got no answer. I found out about a week later that he’d tried to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, but somebody had called the police.

I moved to China to work as an English teacher after graduating, and, to my dad’s credit, he did make some attempts to stay in touch with me. He sent me a long letter from a homeless shelter where he was living (to save money for a trip to Jamaica, he said), but by the time my reply reached him, he’d already moved on.

He sent me another long letter one Christmas telling me about how he’d gotten his life together, and had taken in a homeless cat with two missing legs and nursed it back to health. He gave me a phone number and I called it. It was four AM where he was living, but he told me how happy he was to hear from me before the phone cut out. I was never able to reach him using that number again, and it was the only time I heard his voice during my time abroad.

In July of 2011, I was making plans for my first trip back to the States in three years. At this time, I started to get e-mails from my aunt telling me that my dad was not doing well. One day I was told that if he gave up drinking he might have two years to live, the next he was in rehab and then just a couple of weeks later the news was that he’d gone on a drinking binge and was in the hospital.

I started to make plans to visit him in the hospital, and the last thing I was told before getting on the plane to the USA was that I should come a week or two into my trip instead of right away, to help him make the transition into assisted living after his condition stabilized.

A 12-hour plane ride later, and I was told by my mother upon meeting her at the airport that I needed to get to a hospital in the far-off city of Seattle right away if I wanted to see my father before he died.

The next day was one of the strangest of my life. By the time I made it to the hospital, my grandma, two of my aunts and my dad’s girlfriend were already waiting there. My dad was waiting, too. He was on his way out, but the doctors had been giving him blood to keep him alive for me. His skin had turned a sort of fluorescent yellow like Frankenstein’s monster, and he was clad in a diaper that he was bleeding out into. He looked a thousand years older than when I’d last seen him.

He’d been awake the day before, and had a nice long conversation with hallucinatory versions of my mom, my sister, and me. Hallucinatory me had told him I loved him and that I forgave him for everything. I’m glad, because he never woke up to hear it from my own mouth. My father passed away less than 48 hours later.

This is the version of my father's life that I use to teach ESL lessons on how to introduce family members. More or less true of him in his glory days.

In a way, it could be said that his dying didn’t change my life very much. I went from never seeing to never seeing him.

There will never be another surprise letter, though, and I’ll never again find a phone number that will let me hear his voice. He’ll never know that I’m living successfully half a world away from where we started, and he’ll never know how much I wish he’d taken the two years of life offered him instead of drinking them away in a single night.